‘You Can Never Fill the Gap That's Left’: Expressions of Brotherly Loss in the Second World War

Abstract

Challenging the convention that male grief was always carefully managed and contained, personal narratives can reveal the range of emotional responses to the wartime deaths of brothers including weeping, anger, and guilt. Studying these reactions enables us to explore how predominantly young men traversed the difficult territory between expressions of public and private grief in the Second World War and its aftermath. Awareness of societal demands favouring the ‘stiff upper lip’—the ultimate masculine display of self-restraint—was insufficient to staunch passions. Men showed an acute awareness of the need to demonstrate emotional mastery by restricting their displays of emotion to private spaces and through their readiness to prioritize military and familial obligations over their own personal grief. Despite these conventions, for some men, their determination to mark the feelings they felt for their dead siblings and their memories of childhood companions overcame any reluctance to expose their grief.